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Jun 19, 2022

Joscha Bach — Agency in an Age of Machines

Posted by in categories: biological, robotics/AI, singularity

Synopsis: The arrival of homo sapiens on Earth amounted to a singularity for its ecosystems, a transition that dramatically changed the distribution and interaction of living species within a relatively short amount of time. Such transitions are not unprecedented during the evolution of life, but machine intelligence represents a new phenomenon: for the first time, there are agents on earth that are not part of the biosphere. Instead of competing for a niche in the ecosystems of living systems, AI might compete with life itself.

How can we understand agency in the context of the cooperation and competition between AI, humans and other organisms?

This talk was part of the ‘Stepping Into the Future‘conference.
http://www.scifuture.org/agency-in-age-of-machines-joscha-bach/

Bio: Joscha Bach, Ph.D. is an AI researcher who worked and published about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and has built computational models of motivated decision making, perception, categorization, and concept-formation. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

Joscha has taught computer science, AI, and cognitive science at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and the Institute for Cognitive Science at Osnabrück.

His book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence – PSI: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition” (Oxford University Press) is available on amazon.

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